year-old woman who had fled to Berlin from her ultra -Orthodox Jewish family in Eastern Europe. She was young; she spoke Yiddish and Hebrew, and she in- tended to emigrate to Palestine. She had everything that Kafka longed for- physical health and authentic Jew- ishness. He spent his last days in her company: They read books in Hebrew and Yiddish together, holding fast to their dream of a new life in Palestine. These were perhaps the happiest days of his life. A t the beginning of the nineteen- fifties, in Israel, I became ac- quainted with Kafka's writing, and with his few surviving friends who lived in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Hugo Bergmann, who attended school with Kafka, was a professor of philosophy at Hebrew University. He and Kafka's ed- Itor, Max Brod, sought to cast the writer in a Jewish context, without di- minishing the universal meaning of his work. Kafka's feeling for religion has always been a matter of controversy. Some have perceived him as an exis- tentialist-a nihilist, even. It is no won- der that his works have provoked so many different responses. Religiosity without an institutionalized religion is problematic, but many of Kafka's generation, including Bergmann, Brod, Gershom Scholem, and Martin Buber, were drawn to Judaism without being willing to return to its institutions; they chose to become involved with reli- gious thought intellectually: Buber, who was a teacher at Hebrew University in those years, often lectured on Jewish guilt, in the course of which he was fond of quoting Kafka. Kafka was not internationally cele- brated until after the Second World War. By then, though, he had become quite well known to a small circle of people living in Israel. They were all refugees; they all spoke German; and most of them had grown up in assim- ilated homes like Kafka's. Gershom Scholem illuminated Kafka's work with the Kabbalah. Although Scholem, a celebrated scholar of Jewish mysticism, did not write extensively about Kafka, he regarded him as a distant successor of the ancient Jewish mystics. Scholem often claimed that there were three pillars to Jewish mystical thought: the Bible; the Zohar, or Book of Splen- dor, Jewish mysticism's key text; and the writings of Kafka. Other scholars pointed out that Kafka's way of think- ing, in its twists and turns, was reminis- cent of Talmudic debate. In the forties and fifties, in the cold stone houses of Jerusalem, the refugees sat and discussed Kafka's works as though they were reli- gious texts. The discussion raised, as in a séance, the hopes, the illusions, and the demons of Western culture, disguised for many years, and unmasked during the war. It is well known that Kafka, in his will, ordered Brod, his best friend, to destroy his manuscripts after his death. Mter much thought, Brod decided to violate the terms of the will and publish all the manuscripts in his keeping. We owe much to him, for Kafka had pub- lished little during his lifetime. In 1937, Brod wrote the first in-depth biography of Kafka. His intimate acquaintance with the writer and his environment meant that he was not always an objec- tive observer, but whenever he spoke of Kafka-his humor, his relations with his friends, and their shared journeys- you immediately felt that the man had absorbed the very essence of Kafka, and that no one in the world knew Kafka better than he did. I knew Brod well. We often roamed the streets of Tel Aviv together. A Re- naissance man, he knew much about literature, general history, Jewish his- tory, music, drawing, and theatre, and he was an author in his own right. He was aware that his own work was spread widely over many different fields, whereas his friend Kafka had plumbed the depths of one subject-his night- mares. Brod had immigrated to Pales- tine at practically the last moment- when it was still possible to leave Europe-in 1939, at the age of fifty- five. Even though he knew Hebrew; he had difficulty expressing himself: and, after meeting him years later, I often helped him write letters and short speeches. Although Brod never mas- tered spoken Hebrew, he marvelled at its revival. For me, arriving in Israel at the age of fourteen, Hebrew became a kind of mother tongue within a short while. The two of us lived out the won- drous resuscitation of the language. Brod, a sharp thinker, but innocent - - The best place to retire in one of ÅDlerica s best places to retire. The town of Chapel Hill. The beneþrs of home ownership. The security of continuing care. All in a state-of the-art retirement community that's been designated a retirement resort. That's resort. So visit cedarsofchapelhill. com or call us at 877-929-1995. This just may be the best there is. . 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